by Linda M Au
What’s the old saying? Silence is golden? I wish I could agree.
Back Me Up
Today I’m in pain. I must’ve moved the wrong way or turned funny or coughed or something (also known as exercising at my age). The muscles along the right side of my back went haywire and since then it’s been torture to move—but only in certain directions. Like, to the right. Or the left. I have trouble sitting, getting back up, twisting to one side, reaching down with my right arm, and a whole host of other mundane gerundial movements. I’m sitting in a chair right now dreading hoisting myself up. More than usual, I mean.
The obvious explanation for my dilemma is that I shouldn’t have dragged that five-shelf bookcase up a flight of stairs to the second floor this morning. It’s obvious now, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. And, really, I didn’t do anything extraordinary. I just eased the thing up onto each step, one at a time. I don’t recall pulling any muscles then, and the pain didn’t come till hours later, after I’d been sitting on the couch for a few hours doing a lot of nothing. You know, a typical evening at my house. Still, the mind wants to make connections, and this is the easiest explanation that accounts for the data.
But, it could have happened while I was vacuuming the entryway. (That’ll teach me to clean the house.) At one point the belt slipped off the upright vacuum and I had to un-upright it and take the plastic bottom off, holding the whole contraption between my knees at a weird angle and cleaning out the gunk and hair while putting the belt back on properly. Perhaps I held something at an odd angle for too long and yanked something then. Besides the vacuum belt, I mean.
Doesn’t matter. I’d love to sink into the waterbed right now and let the heated water in the mattress help the muscles unknot. But I’m afraid I won’t be able to get back out and I’d be declared lost at sea. (See “Water, Water Everywhere” on page 95.)
Plus, the TV that was in our bedroom had to be sent back to the cable company (we got it free as part of their cable rewards program so we got what we paid for), so we’re TV-less in that room for the next few weeks.
This would be a perfect time to read a book, but I’ve never quite mastered the art of reading a book in that sloshy waterbed. Severe seasickness comes to mind. My mind. Literally.
Oh, dear. I feel my entire right side tensing up again. A hot shower earlier had loosened things up enough to move around with only a little excruciating, searing pain—which was an improvement—but the effects seem to be wearing off. I can’t turn to the right at all now.
As a last resort I may climb into Wayne’s recliner with a book and the TV remote. Sounds like nirvana for a lot of people, but it’s tough for me to get comfortable in that thing. It’s made for people well over six feet tall, not short things topping out at five feet, two inches. I feel like Edith Ann in her rocking chair, legs dangling six inches off the floor.
But lying in the recliner would give me the support I need for my back and the creature comforts I’m not ready to do without right now.
I may resort to getting the hot water bottle, which is only for very old people who actually know how to use them without scalding their asses.
It’s not a bad idea, really, to try that—or anything else—as long as I don’t have to turn to the right to do it.
Field Trip to the Drive-In
Last night the kids and I had the brilliant idea to go the drive-in to see a double-header of Finding Nemo and Tomb Raider 2. We spent the early evening scrambling around getting ready. I popped some popcorn, the girls helped pack up the car with a blanket, four camping chairs, and a cooler (with grapes, cauliflower—Grace’s favorite munchie on the Atkins diet—and some ranch dressing to dip the cauliflower in). We scurried out of here a few minutes later than I would have liked, but we didn’t forget to bring anything.
Or so we thought.
We stopped at a local beverage place to get cans of soda (“pop” in western Pennsylvania, but I refuse to call it “pop,” ever) and were finally off. Made it through the construction on Route 60 and were soon outside the drive-in waiting in line to turn in off the street and get into the driveway of the theater. A worker was doing a walk-through telling everyone that American Wedding was sold out, which didn’t bother us, of course. In fact, all the cars turning around and leaving ahead of us made getting off the street that much easier. We paid our cheap fees to get in and the ticket window worker told us to make sure to tune our radios to 97.5 FM to get the sound for our movie. (Each screen has its own radio frequency—a far cry from the days when we used to grab a big metal contraption off a metal stand at our parking spots and hook it onto the car window and had to make a mental note not to leave with the thing still stuck to the window.)
I’m sure you all know where this is going by now. But I digress.
The place was so crowded we ended up making our own parking spot, way down front, way off to the right (almost up against the guard rail over the road below). I made sure all the windows were down before turning off the car. And, I instinctively reached for the radio dial to turn it to 97.5 … F … M …
There was only a hole—and some loose wires—where my radio used to be. I forgot Wayne had taken out the faulty tape deck.
Somehow, the now-obvious fact that we should have brought a boombox with batteries had totally escaped me while I was popping popcorn and buying cans of soda (not pop) and generally running around like an idiot a few hours earlier.
After a collective smacking of foreheads, we decided to steal everyone else’s radio noise by setting up our camping chairs by the car with the loudest radio. We set up the chairs close enough to hear their radio but not so close that we’d have to marry anyone in the morning. Worked quite well for Finding Nemo. Had no trouble hearing anything. That was the up side of having the place full of cars. Radios everywhere.
But, as usually happens with drive-ins playing two flicks, a nice handful of people (the ones with little kids who came mainly for Finding Nemo, which was pretty much everybody within a two-mile radius) left at the intermission. Once Tomb Raider 2 came on we had trouble finding a spot close enough to hear someone else’s radio. Not without being so blatantly obvious that they’d call the authorities. And once Addie ended up in the back seat of the car half-asleep, we called it a night and came home—about a half-hour into Tomb Raider.
For those of you not familiar with drive-ins and drive-in etiquette: Don’t get the impression that we just chummed up to strangers. Well, we did—a little. But most everyone brings camping chairs, mosquito candles, coolers, and blankets and sits outside their cars. I just love the atmosphere of the drive-in.
But I also love hearing a movie I’ve paid to see, so it was best to leave early and learn our lesson. (Note to Self: Beg husband to reinstall tape deck.)
It’s been a long weekend.
The Winter of Their Discontent
My folks have been living here in western Pennsylvania for a little while now. They grew up on the eastern side of the state and raised my brother and me there, then retired ten years early and moved to Las Vegas to gamble away our inheritance. You know, like most parents do.
But, after a decade of living the high life, they moved back east to be closer to the grandchildren. However, until they moved here, I’d never lived closer to my parents than three hundred miles. Having them five miles away is very, very different.
So far, it’s worked out well. They know not to stop by my house any time before ten a.m. or they will be shot on sight, and I know not to call their house any time after nine p.m. because they probably went to bed as soon as it got dark. Once we got the night owl/morning person thing cleared up, everything else seemed to fall into place. And I find I’m truly enjoying having them in the same county with me.
At dinner, my mother and I can discuss the beauty and wonder of Pennsylvania potholes, a phenomenon she and my father had all but forgotten out west in Nevada. She will quickly relearn that, in Pennsylvania, people exchange pothole stories the way some men swap fishing or golf
stories. (“Oh yeah? My PT Cruiser fell into a pothole the size of Aunt Martha’s butt!”)
I predict it’ll all come back to them in a post-traumatic-stress-disorder sort of way sometime in mid-February. Then there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. And tires. Gnashing of tires too. That’s the really ugly part.
And, it’s fun to hear these Las Vegas folks say things like, “Gee, it’s cold!” fifty times in one visit. In June.
Then again, my dad is the same guy who, when he moved to Vegas in 1994, kept saying things like, “Gee, it’s so hot!” And my mother kept saying, “Yes, John, you live in a desert, remember?” How this slipped his mind is beyond me. They had an eight-foot cactus in their front yard.
So, now, when she says it’s cold (while wearing twelve layers of thermal clothing), I just shake my head and roll my eyes.
Then again, I have a husband who spends most of the winter going barefoot around our house, wearing shorts and T-shirts, and turning the heat up to 74 degrees. The logic of this escapes me. Apparently he never lived out west long enough to know that you’re not supposed to turn up the heat back east—you’re supposed to add another eleven layers of clothing, ear muffs, and big, fuzzy slippers. And brew another pot of decaf.
He could take some lessons from my mother on how to keep warm. She’s an expert. Just not in Pennsylvania.
Eat’n Puke
One of the perks of living in western Pennsylvania—besides the great baseball team and more annual rainfall than Seattle—is a chain of family restaurants called Eat’n Park. Charming, inexpensive, clean, and low-key enough to tolerate families with toddlers, it quickly became a favorite place to eat out when the children were very little.
So, when I found myself spending my first Valentine’s Day post-divorce with a three-year-old and a one-year-old in tow, the logical thing to do was to pick myself up, dust myself off, and take the three of us out to our local Eat’n Park for dinner. After all, the girls were too young to understand the poignant nature of the occasion, and it felt good to take my mind off what had become the lousiest holiday of the year (with the possible exception of the annual National Eggs Benedict Day on April 16).
As we ate, my one-year-old daughter, Addie, merely sucked on whatever bits of food I gave her from my own plate but Grace, the three-year-old, chose her own dinner of chicken fingers and fries, both of which she promptly slathered with ketchup. (Heinz, of course—it’s required by law in western Pennsylvania.)
The evening might have turned out better if I had gone with my instincts and said no to her request for chocolate milk to accompany her chicken and fries. (To be blunt, the evening would have turned out better if I had stayed home, locked myself in a closet with a rabid weasel, and fed us both cold sauerkraut through a straw, but hindsight is 20/20.) And perhaps I still had a chance of salvaging the experience if I had said no to her request for a second glass of chocolate milk. Or said no to her insisting that she gulp it down as if she were part of a pit crew gassing up Jeff Gordon’s car. And oh, the things that might have been different if I had factored in her congenital motion sickness and easily upset stomach …
But no, I was feeling indulgent as only an eternally guilt-ridden mother can feel, and I allowed Grace all these personal excesses because the glee on her little toddler face seemed worth it—at the time.
At the end of our meal, I stood and lifted baby Addie out of the high chair, slinging her onto my hip. I motioned to Grace to stand and get ready to leave. She hoisted back her glass for that last chug of chocolate milk before standing on the bench seat for all around us to see. She was so darned adorable standing there smiling at the admiring groups of little old ladies who were seated in neighboring booths, all of us celebrating this Valentine’s Day bereft of male companionship but yet happy to be with friends and family. She soaked up the murmured compliments and smiles, and so did I as the proud mother.
Until Grace said, softly but urgently, “Uh oh.”
I had just enough time to look at her, standing on that seat, now at eye level with me, before it hit me that a social disaster of epic proportions was about to occur.
And yet, instead I asked, “What’s wrong, Grace?”
“I think I’m going to be—”
That last word, which was painfully unnecessary by this time, was cut off by a thick brown volcanic eruption that emanated from her tiny little mouth, arcing upward in a vaulted stream and then down to the table below with the force of Old Faithful and a curvature that fleetingly reminded me of the St. Louis Arch. Bits of chicken breading took a road less traveled, landing at other points in the booth and tempting me to yell out “Fire in the hole!” for everyone’s safety.
Instead, I stood rooted silently to the floor, watching as Grace’s projectile vomiting continued with no hope of ever letting up. The look on Grace’s face had changed from the previous moment’s sanguine smile to abject horror at the shock she was imposing on everyone around us. In that instant, I again knew what was coming next but was oddly paralyzed to stop it. The slow-motion camera that activates whenever tragic phenomena occur had just kicked in, and I watched in dismay as Grace—with the knowledge of basic physics of a three-year-old—tried to obstruct the forward progress of the vomit-volcano by placing her hands in front of her still-spewing mouth.
Unfortunately, the hands of a three-year-old are tiny and unable to block the unstoppable force that is projectile vomiting. Much as a poorly built dam will eventually burst, allowing the water to flow unimpeded in any direction it wishes, so too was the reappearance of Grace’s dinner. As she desperately continued to clamp both her hands over her mouth, the unrelenting puke-stream merely found its easiest point of opening: between her fingers.
All this did was redirect the chocolate gush straight upward, covering her face, soaking even her eyelashes on its way across the top of her head and into every corner of her otherwise gorgeous, glossy black hair. I began to question my own recollection of the laws of physics as I watched in repulsed fascination the strange gravity-defying path of the chunk-laden stream before me.
Perhaps only five seconds had passed since the first eruption. Yet, of course, it seemed more like endless purgatorial hours of torture, watching this continue and yet powerless to stop it. Little Addie continued to cling to my left hip, oblivious to the faux pas (and globs of ketchup) now coagulating all over the booth table and seats. But, naturally, the incident hadn’t escaped the notice of several Eat’n Park employees, and a handful of nearby patrons, who were likely vowing next time to stick to the nursing home dinner buffet, which never served chocolate milk for this very reason. I slowly became aware of the service people around us, several of whom had rushed up with large terrycloth towels, which they flung onto the table in a frantic attempt to cover up the offensive bits and pieces of, well, whatever this stuff had been before this uncontrolled toddler had gotten a hold of it.
I heard myself apologizing in a stunned monotone that smacked of clinical shock, sounding muffled and far away, part of that same slow-motion effect that hadn’t left since the first molecules of chocolate resurfaced nearly a minute earlier. No one was listening to me, though. Total situational anarchy had broken out, with mops and muffled screaming now added to the towels in the ongoing vain effort to stanch the hemorrhage of reemergent dinner items swimming in a chocolate geyser.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the surging swell of supper ended. As the employees rushed around mopping and toweling, while mumbling incoherent but likely imprecatory turns of phrase, Addie yawned on my hip, and I held my breath waiting for Round Two. Grace cautiously moved her useless toddler hands away from her mouth, blinking chocolate drops off her long black eyelashes and looking at me for guidance.
None was forthcoming. I was busy planning our escape route. The townspeople were restless.
Cinderella Understood Writers
Because writing does not yet pay the bills for me, it too often remains at the bottom of my to-do list each day. I’ve heard all
the suggestions about carving out time for writing, about making it such a priority that you hang a sign on your home office door that says, “Don’t bother me unless you’re bleeding or something is on fire. I’m writing!”
As things are going currently, there are a few things wrong with these suggestions at my house. First, my home office has no door. The house used to be apartments, and my office used to be the upstairs kitchen. There was a bifold door on it when my son used it as a bedroom (the only bedroom with a sink and cabinets), but that’s now buried somewhere up in the attic. Trust me: No one wants to venture up there to look for a bifold door just so I can hang a paper sign on it.
Another dilemma is that I was blessed at birth with an innate sense of panic, anxiety and guilt. If someone in the house is upset, it is automatically my fault and I must make things right. If someone feels bored, I must entertain the masses. If someone needs a load of laundry done, I must drop what I am doing and take the laundry basket down to the basement. Despite being a mediocre cook, and despite having a semi-empty nest, I am also responsible for dinner, and in some cases lunch. I pack lunches for family members who work outside the house. I also do grocery shopping, clutter-control, and the modest amount of cleaning I can bring myself to endure.
And, of course, I do freelance copy editing, proofreading, and sometimes typesetting as projects come in. I rarely turn down projects—part of that “Just Say Yes” syndrome that we guilt-ridden folks are born with. We don’t wish to hurt anyone’s feelings, even clients we’ve met only through e-mails, and so we say yes to everything and then hope a calendar day magically becomes forty hours long.
In my guilt-ridden mind, all of these things must come before writing. I pick up on the unspoken opinion that the writing should come in dead last, after I take out your trash or paint your living room or run to the bank or take you to the movies or a trip to the store for some Very Important Personal Shopping at the last minute.
I don’t know why I buy into these opinions. I don’t know why I cannot hang that proverbial sign on the rhetorical door and force family members to fend for themselves for a few short hours every day.
